Rapidly Built Medical Crash Cart! Lessons Learned and Impacts on High-Stakes Team Collaboration in the Emergency Room

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of supporting high-stakes, time-sensitive teamwork in emergency medicine with autonomous-leaning robot teammates. It details a rapid-prototyping program that evolves from a teleoperated crash-cart robot to a multimodal, feedback-enabled system (MCCR3) designed to assist clinicians without compromising safety. Through field deployments at ER training events and rigorous mixed-methods evaluation, the authors identify tangible benefits (reduced workload) and clear usability barriers, alongside a taxonomy of robot-related failures. They propose design guidelines for integrating robots into high-stakes care, publish a tutorial for building MCCRs, and highlight future work to broaden clinical contexts and improve adoption. Collectively, the work advances practical HRI methods for safety-critical settings and provides actionable insights for designing assistive robotic tools in emergency care.

Abstract

Designing robots to support high-stakes teamwork in emergency settings presents unique challenges, including seamless integration into fast-paced environments, facilitating effective communication among team members, and adapting to rapidly changing situations. While teleoperated robots have been successfully used in high-stakes domains such as firefighting and space exploration, autonomous robots that aid highs-takes teamwork remain underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a rapid prototyping process to develop a series of seemingly autonomous robot designed to assist clinical teams in the Emergency Room. We transformed a standard crash cart--which stores medical equipment and emergency supplies into a medical robotic crash cart (MCCR). The MCCR was evaluated through field deployments to assess its impact on team workload and usability, identified taxonomies of failure, and refined the MCCR in collaboration with healthcare professionals. Our work advances the understanding of robot design for high-stakes, time-sensitive settings, providing insights into useful MCCR capabilities and considerations for effective human-robot collaboration. By publicly disseminating our MCCR tutorial, we hope to encourage HRI researchers to explore the design of robots for high-stakes teamwork.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: We built three teleoperated medical crash cart robots (MCCRs). MCCR 1 delivers supplies using a hoverboard circuit. MCCR 2 delivers supplies, recommends supplies using drawer opening capabilities, and was deployed at a medical training event which revealed insights. This led to the MCCR 3 design which recommends supplies and generates tasks reminders using drawer lights, speech, and alerts.
• Figure 2: We built Prototype 1 by connecting the Garbatrage hoverboard circuit mandel2023recapturing to a tool cart using metal chassis, cardboard, and tape.
• Figure 3: Schematic of linear actuator array for drawer opening mechanism and CAD of actuator and holder.
• Figure 4: Prototype 2: (Top) The first actuator case prototype pushed the actuator back when it opened so we built a more stable casing to hold it in place. (Bottom) Assembly of hardware components.
• Figure 5: Demographic locations of field deployment attendants.